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Sunday, October 12, 2014

Douglas Carswell, who made history as the first elected Ukip MP last week, said he hoped more Tories joined him but insisted the party was "not the Conservative party in exile".

He likened the Tories to failed music store HMV. "The way the Tory party is retailing politics is like the way HMV retailed music. It's a defunct retail model," he said on the Andrew Marr show this morning.

Somewhere, David Cameron is punching the air and going "not Our Price. At least we're not Our Price."

Let's just leave aside the suggestion that retailing is a good metaphor for politics, because it's almost certainly depressingly true.

Carswell's wrong, of course. When it looked like HMV might vanish from the high streets of Britain, everyone thought that would be a bad thing.

1 comment:

The main area where the analogy falls down, of course, is that politics isn't a free market as the music industry is, and most Tories have a vested interest in ensuring it remains decidedly unfree and fixed.

Even though the weather and the wedding were almost fixed against it, I tend to feel more and more that had the Left-dominated campaign in favour of AV swallowed its pride and allowed UKIP (and Michael Gove) to play an active and prominent role, they could still have won despite that. It was as if the Left kept it narrow and pure because they clearly didn't want to help UKIP - that they were almost afraid of winning lest it not actually benefit them.